NMR in biomedicine
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Knee degeneration involves all the major tissues in the joint. However, conventional MRI sequences can only detect signals from long T2 tissues such as the superficial cartilage, with little signal from the deep cartilage, menisci, ligaments, tendons and bone. It is highly desirable to develop new sequences that can detect signal from all major tissues in the knee. ⋯ Much improved curve fitting was achieved for all UTE-Cones biomarkers with greatly reduced root mean square errors. The averaged T1 , T2 *, AdiabT1ρ , MTR and f for knee joint tissues of 15 healthy volunteers were reported. The 3D UTE-Cones quantitative imaging techniques (ie, T1 , T2 *, AdiabT1ρ , MTR and MT modeling) together with elastix motion correction provide robust volumetric measurement of relaxation times, MTR and f of both short and long T2 tissues in the knee joint.